


The Language of Birds

by Elleth



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Blood Drinking, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Vampirism, somewhat dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 16:27:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20820317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/pseuds/Elleth
Summary: Thuringwethil has always known what her end would be... but when it comes, it comes differently than expected.





	The Language of Birds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Solanaceae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/gifts).

Her song began among pinpricks of light, descended into a chaos of blood and night wind, and ended in a nightingale's trill. Even then, even at the very beginning, Thuringwethil - then not yet knowing what that half-note was, not quite in being yet, but in the promise of it - knew she would meet her end someday, when she heard that note, sung in the language of birds. 

When she tumbled into the cacophony of Melkor, that single bright thread hung before her mental eye, a tenuous connection to before when her leather wings had beaten doing Varda's bidding and she had been loved and embraced as one of them, as it should be, and she drank the nectar of flowers under the young stars, not the warm, rich blood that sustained her after. 

After all, there were no flowers in Angband, or rather, none that she would drink from. There were things that smelled like carrion, springing up at the first sunrise in the rocky crannies of her lair in Thangorodrim, and drove her out into the blinding-bright daybreak, and her eyes watered as if she were dancing around the lights of Illuin and Ormal, as she had once done. She had cried at their beauty then, not because of their light. 

She shunned the carrion flowers after, finding new lairs in ever less hospitable places that the sun and moon would not reach, where she had time and patience to muse, when she was not flying errands. She wanted darkness, then, perpetual to fly under its cover and go where she wanted. 

To find what she wanted. The Elves had come out of the West then, and Beleriand teemed with life. She ate well on the battlefields in the wake of the armies by those that had been left behind, their very blood like the memory of light upon her tongue. Their despair and longing made it sweeter still, as if they had become the flowers she remembered. 

She took joy in their destruction. Some, seeming especially worthwhile, she spared for Melkor and Mairon, to serve as slaves and subjects to their experiments, as hostages, but only so to know they would suffer more than under her teeth at their throat. Others she turned into a lesser kindred of her own making, and relished the screeches beyond hearing when most, weeping, fled west to no doubt seek solace in the arms of the Keeper of the Dead. Some stayed with her, and loved her, as much as they could, out of the impulse of their own twisted souls without her own doing. She humored them for a while, coupled with them, men and women both, and learned the pleasures of the flesh, before she drank them dry when they lay in a blissful stupor after. 

And even in all that time, she waited for the nightingale song, on some battlefield somewhere, on some meaningless errand or another. It came when she rested on Tol-in-Gaurhoth, shook the fortress and herself, to her core and beyond, reaching curls of light into her past, and reeling her back to past self and her undoing as surely as she needed blood to live. 

Her master fought and lost and fled, the coward. She laughed to see him fly, dripping blood even as a vampire much more immense than herself and still defeated, and winged from her tower to meet the song she'd waited for all her life, toward fulfilment of her purpose. 

The nightingale song in Lúthien's voice drew her like they had been made for one another, like she had been a bird once without truly knowing it, and changed into what she was, a bat-winged, bloated thing in her Fall… and her spirit called out to Lúthien in a feeble screech at the edge of hearing, pitiful among the sweetness of Lúthien's song, but threading through it into a whole, and Lúthien reached for her as she alighted, taking her clawed wings into her soft hands, and smiled. 

"Welcome, sister-in-soul," Lúthien said, in their shared language, older than Time and Being, and Thuringwethil's body answered for her, a hot surge of need. 

"I am glad to have found you, Secret Shadow." 

"As I am to have found you, Nightingale." 

Understanding like none she had ever felt. Joy, like dancing in the light of Illuin and Ormal. Had she been a bird then, and simply forgotten, replacing memories of her past with her long-lasting present? 

"Let me aid you," Lúthien said, and everything in Thuringwethil ached to answer _yes_, but she had not been in the darkness for so long without learning that everything would exact a price. This would take her very being. Nothing, where at least before, Secret Shadow had been. 

"Lie with me," she said to Lúthien. "I will ask of you to give yourself before I give my own." Perhaps, she thought, Lúthien's blood might be the sweetest yet, heady like wine as it spilled over her lips. 

Lúthien looked thoughtful for a little while, lifting her head to look at the stars in between torn clouds above the Isle, and her hands tightened on the claws of Thuringwethil's bat-fell. Enough Elves had perished on her claws that Thuringwethil knew when the palm of Lúthien's hands gave, and the scent of her blood - night flowers and iron, and promise above all else - sealed her answer. 

Lúthien offered her palm to Thuringwethil, dark pearls of blood on it, and Thuringwethil knelt to bring it against her lips in supplication, closing her eyes in bliss against the taste. Each drop between her lips shook her to her core. 

And changed her. Where the leather-skin of her wings had been, feathers grew. Where light, even the soft shine of the stars, had always been a discomfort, she could feel its sweetness again. Her voice grew rich and sweet as she laughed - a bird's voice, and she reached up in wonder to grasp at Lúthien - and something hard and painful pricked her palm, and pearls of blood burst forth. 

Lúthien lifted Thuringwethil's hand to her lips, and smiled with a fanged mouth, a bat-tongue poking between red-blood lips, a bloated, white thing in a bristly bat-fell, and she sank to her knees to pull Thuringwethil to her, laughing like a thin screech. 

She still was beautiful, and Thuringwethil gladly lay with her, and loved her, and let herself go. 

When she awoke at dawn she was alone, and she was herself, and she winged west, homeward and free, singing in the language of birds.

**Author's Note:**

> If Arwen can pass on her grace to someone else, who's to say that Lúthien can't? I hope you enjoyed, at any rate! ♥


End file.
